I'd square the circle by arguing that the "legacy" uniforms and traditions arguments are a question of long-term vs. short-term thinking. If they differentiate college football from other sports consumption opportunities then jettisoning them damages the long-term value of the Michigan 'brand' for short term jersey sales. So there is a perfectly rational free-market argument for actions that cost money in the short term (even if only by way of opportunity cost). That's my read on Brian's argument.

To the extent that Michigan gains differential brand equity by a greater attention to tradition in all its forms, it could make sense to do so even when other rivals are exercising those opportunities. So long as there is a way for Michigan to extract value from that tradition (e.g., higher-value TV rights, broader fan base, 110k attendance in down years).

So with the addition of the 2009 data, I wondered if there was a way to refine the games-won estimate. My read is that mistersuits subtracted Michigan's N-PPG of 36.3 from opponent's N-PPG (or 125% of N-PPG). Just for fun, I wondered what including some randomness might yield...

Some notes and assumptions:

Opponent output vs Michigan in 2009 averaged 124% of the rest of their schedule with a standard deviation of 0.3. I used that as the baseline for 2010.

I assumed opponent points scored is normally distributed with a mean of 1.24 * N-PPG and stdev of 0.3 * N-PPG

I assumed Michigan's scoring is also normally distributed with a mean of 36.3 and stdev of 0.3 * 36.3 = 10.8 (just used the 2009 opponent data for simplicity)

The difference between Michigan and opponent's score is normal with mean 36.3 - 1.24*N-PPG and stdev of sqrt(10.8^2 + 0.3*1.24*N-PPG^2)

This yields probabilities of Michigan victory of:

Team

p(Muppets)

Expected wins

Connecticut

54%

Notre Dame

72%

UMass

71%

BGSU

59%

2.6

Indiana

62%

MSU

57%

Iowa

52%

Penn St

79%

Illinois

79%

Purdue

88%

Wisconsin

44%

tOSU

24%

4.9

7.4

For the 4 games in the bag, this seems pessimistic (based on this, there's only a 16% chance of willing all four games). What happens if we dial all of our opponents back to 100% of expected PPG output?

Team

p(Muppets)

Expected wins

Connecticut

72%

Notre Dame

85%

UMass

85%

BGSU

77%

3.2

Indiana

79%

MSU

75%

Iowa

71%

Penn St

89%

Illinois

90%

Purdue

94%

Wisconsin

64%

tOSU

42%

6.0

9.2

9.2 expected wins on the season, 6 in conference play. The probability of winning the first four games is now up to 40%.

An attack of the Angry-BLANK-Hating-God on the offense (or just tougher Big Ten defenses) that cuts Michigan PPG production by 25% would yield 3.1-4.4 conference wins.

The first couple Big Ten games will obviously tell us a lot, but this year has been a lot more fun than the last three...

I felt no emptiness watching the offense that game, just the sort of glee that makes your head explode.

That was a game where the defense was giving us 8 yards a play (at least through the better part of the first half). I have no doubt that there are variants on many of the plays we saw Saturday that end in a ball flying downfield. Let's keep some tools in the bag for the rest of the season.